There was hair in my mouth.
It was across my face and over my eyes, and some of it was in my mouth, and I lay there trying to work out whose it was. Nobody in our house had hair like that. Brett kept his short for football. Mom’s stopped at her chin. Mine had come off at the barber’s that morning, number two all over, and I could still feel the cape snapping shut at the back of my neck.
A hand came and lifted the hair off my face, a few strands at a time, the way you take the tape off a present when you want to keep the paper.
“Paige,” someone said.
I didn’t know any Paiges.
The ceiling had square white tiles with tiny holes in them and a brown water stain on the one over the light. My ceiling at home was the bumpy kind. Something beside my head beeped slowly, and the air smelled of hand sanitizer, and none of it was my room.
“Paige. Oh, honey. Oh, thank God. Can you hear me? Can you see me? Squeeze my hand. Can you squeeze my hand?”
I squeezed it.
The woman holding my hand made a sound and put her forehead down on the blanket next to my arm. I had never seen her before in my life. Her hair was blond and held up with a pencil stuck through it, and she had on a fleece vest with COULEE stitched small on the chest. The chair behind her had been folded out into a sort of bed, with a blanket on it and a pillow with a dent.
“Somebody,” she said toward the door. It wasn’t loud. “Somebody. She’s awake.”
I looked past her at the door to see who she meant. There wasn’t anybody else in the room.
The last thing I had was my desk: the clock radio saying 12:06, and the corner coming up at me. I put my free hand to my forehead, where the corner should have hit. There was no bandage and no bump. There was only hair, a lot of it, more than anybody could grow in a night. I took some between two fingers and pulled, and my scalp pulled back.
A nurse came in. She was older than the woman, with reading glasses pushed up into grey hair and a lanyard covered in pins: a ladybug, a maple leaf, a tooth with a face.
“Well, hello,” she said. “Look who’s decided to join us. I’m Yvette. I’ve been looking after you all week, and I have to tell you, you’ve been very boring.”
“All week,” I said.
It came out as a croak, high and scratched, and I stopped and put my hand over my mouth. That wasn’t my voice. It wasn’t any voice I knew.
“Don’t try to talk too much yet,” Yvette said. “Your throat’s been on holiday.”
She shone a little light in each of my eyes and watched something in them. She held up two fingers and asked how many. She had me push against her hands with my feet, and then pull. Then she sat on the edge of the bed with her clipboard.
“Can you tell me your name, sweetheart?”
I opened my mouth to tell her. The name I’d had for fourteen years got as far as my teeth and stayed there. The woman with the pencil in her hair had stopped crying to listen. Everything in her face was waiting for a different one.
“I want my mom,” I said.
“I’m here.” The woman held my hand tighter. “Honey, I’m right here. I’m right here.”
I looked at her. Then I looked at the door again. Nobody came through it.
“That’s okay,” Yvette said. “Let’s do some easy ones. Do you know where you are?”
“A hospital.”
“Do you know which one?”
I didn’t. I didn’t know how I’d got to a hospital at all.
“That’s all right. What year is it?”
“Two thousand eight.”
“Good girl. Who’s the prime minister?”
“Stephen Harper.”
“That’s better than my husband would do.” She wrote it down. “And do you know who this is, sweetheart?”
I looked at the woman. She had a tissue balled up in one hand and my hand in the other.
It wasn’t my hand. It was smaller than mine, and the nails were painted pink, carefully, a little over the edges on two of the fingers. I made it into a fist. It made a fist. I opened it, and it opened.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Somebody had mixed up the rooms, or the kids, or the charts. Or I was still at the bottom of the deep end, and in a minute I’d go up.
* * *
Dr. Anand came at ten. By then the woman had washed her face and taken the pencil out of her hair, and her name was Tracy, and according to everybody, she was my mother.
She told me that herself, sitting on the side of the bed, all in one breath. “I’m your mom. Tracy. You call me Mom. You’re Paige. Paige Elise Dekker. You turned fourteen last Saturday. We live in Calgary now, we just moved from Lethbridge. You don’t remember Lethbridge? That’s okay. That’s okay. Do you want some water? Can she have water? Is she allowed?”
Yvette said I could have water. I held the cup with both hands so nobody would see them shaking.
Dr. Anand was a small woman with very short hair who wore a cardigan even though it was June. She pulled a chair up to the bed so her face was level with mine, and she talked to me and not over me to Tracy. Most adults don’t do that with someone in a bed.
“You came in last Sunday morning,” she said.
“What’s today?”
“Saturday. The twenty-first.”
A week. Mom would be going out of her mind. Dad would have called the police, and somebody would have phoned Manny’s house.
“Your mom couldn’t wake you,” Dr. Anand said, and Tracy nodded, as if she’d been there. “You’d had a fall in the night and hit your head on the bed frame. Here.” She touched the back of her own head, low, on the left.
I put my hand there. Under the hair there was a sore place, a lump going soft.
“I didn’t hit the bed,” I said. “I hit the desk.”
Everybody looked at me.
“Honey,” Tracy said, “your desk’s still in the garage. We haven’t put it together yet.”
“That’s very common,” Dr. Anand said. “Pieces come back, and some of them come back in the wrong places.” She waited to see if I’d say anything else. I didn’t.
“The scans show a bruise,” Dr. Anand said. “Not a bad one. A bruise like that doesn’t explain a week.” She held up a hand before Tracy could speak. “The fluid from your spine showed some inflammation. So we think a virus. An encephalitis. And the fall on top of it.”
“Which virus?” Tracy said. “Is it West Nile? It was bad down south last summer. She was outside all last summer. Is it contagious? Do I need to be tested?”
“It isn’t West Nile. We checked.” Dr. Anand turned to her for the next part. “It may be something we never name. That happens more than people think. Has she been anywhere unusual? Camping? Sleepovers? Around any other children who were sick?”
“She doesn’t,” Tracy said, and stopped. “We just moved. She doesn’t know anybody here yet.”
Dr. Anand nodded and wrote that down too, and turned back to me.
“The other thing is memory,” she said. “After an injury like this it’s very common to lose some. Usually it’s the time around the injury. Sometimes it’s more. Often it’s the personal things that go, and the facts about the world come through fine.” She smiled a little. “Yvette tells me you know the prime minister.”
“Will it come back?” Tracy said.
“It may. It may not. I can’t tell you which, and I’d be lying if I said I could.”
“When will we know? Is there something I should be doing? Should I show her pictures? Should I not show her pictures? She’s starting at a new school in September. Bow Crest. A junior high. Will she need a note?”
“Pictures are fine. Familiar things are fine. Don’t push.” Dr. Anand looked at me again. “One more thing, and I want you to hear it too, Paige, not just your mom. Episodes like this can recur. If you’re ever very hard to wake, nobody waits to see. They call 911.”
“911,” Tracy said.
The window was bright blue. Somewhere down below it there was a road with a lot of trucks on it, going somewhere at ten in the morning. I’d read once that a person could get by on four hours of sleep a night. I decided on three.
* * *
After lunch Tracy read me the cards.
They stood in a row along the bedside table. There was a big one from her office with ACCOUNTS PAYABLE in balloon letters on the front, and inside, a lot of names and get well soon!! in different pens. There was one from Aunt Trish in Lethbridge with a kitten on it. There was a teddy bear from the gift shop wearing a little hospital gown that tied at the back.
“I’m going to call your dad,” Tracy said. “And get a coffee. Do you want anything? A pop? Can you have pop? I’ll ask. Ten minutes. I’ll be ten minutes.”
She left the door open a crack. I heard her stop in the hall, and the beep of her cellphone, and the nurse at the desk saying, “Not on the unit, please.”
“One minute,” Tracy said. “I’m sorry. One minute.”
“She’s awake,” she said. “No. No, she doesn’t. She doesn’t know me, Murray.”
Then she was quiet.
“I know,” she said. “I know that. I know.”
Her shoes went away down the hall. I looked at the cards again. Behind the bear there was one more. It was plain white on the front, folded once, with no envelope.
I had to reach across myself to get it, and the needle taped into the back of my other hand pulled. Inside, on the left, somebody had drawn two balloons in the same blue pen and coloured them in with pencil crayon, one pink and one blue. Their strings went down and crossed and were tied together at the bottom in a little bow. On the right, in blue ballpoint, in ordinary joined-up handwriting like a teacher’s, it said:
One year. Then wish again, together: stay, or go back.
There was no name under it.
I read it four times. I turned it over. The back was blank. I held it up to the window, as if there might be something else inside it, and there wasn’t.
Nobody knew what I’d wished. I hadn’t said it out loud. I hadn’t even moved my lips. I’d been careful about that since I was six.
If the card was about the wish, then so was the hair. So was the hand, and the voice, and the woman with the pencil who kept calling me honey. That was stupid. Wishes didn’t do anything. That was the whole point of them. I put the card face down on the blanket and looked at the water stain until Tracy came back.
When Tracy came back with her coffee she picked it up.
“Oh, that one,” she said. “Isn’t that sweet? I think the volunteers do those. There was a man with a cart on Thursday, books and puzzles.” She read it upside down. “Stay, or go back.” She laughed, a bit high. “Go back where? Lethbridge? Somebody’s been talking to your aunt Trish.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well, we’re staying, honey. Don’t you worry about that. We’re staying.” She sat down in the folded-out chair and held the coffee in both hands without drinking it. “Your dad says hi. He drove up on Tuesday and sat with you all afternoon. He’s going to try to come for the weekend.”
I put the card under my pillow. When she went to the washroom I took it out and read it again. Stay, or go back. I didn’t have to think about that part. I knew which before I got to the end of the line. It was the other word that stuck. Together. Together with who?
I put it back under the pillow, flat, where I could feel the edge of it against my neck.
* * *
That evening Yvette took the needle out of my hand and put a cotton ball and a Band-Aid on the place. She said it was time I saw the washroom, since I’d been paying rent on it all week.
My legs felt a week old. Yvette held my elbow. Tracy walked behind us with both hands out, as if I might spill.
The washroom had a rail along one wall and a sink lower than sinks usually are and a mirror over the sink. I held the rail with my left hand. Yvette said she’d be right outside and pulled the door to.
I looked up.
There was a girl in the mirror. I turned around to see who’d come in behind me, too fast, and had to grab the rail with both hands. There was nobody. There was the door, and a towel on a hook on the back of it.
I turned back. She was holding the rail with both hands too.
She was about my age, with a long face and straight black hair, a lot of it, down past her shoulders and tangled at the back from a week on a pillow. Her eyebrows went up in the middle so she looked worried. I let go of the rail with one hand and lifted it. So did she. I touched my cheek, and she touched hers, and it was my cheek that felt it.
I knew those eyebrows. They’d made me look worried in every school picture since kindergarten. I knew the face, too. I’d spent fourteen years not looking at it in the bathroom mirror in Hawkwood.
This was that face. It had stopped being wrong.
I looked at it as long as I wanted. That turned out to be until Yvette knocked.
“You okay in there, sweetheart?”
“Yes,” I said.
It was the voice that had asked for my mom that morning. It was the voice I’d only ever heard in my head. I said it again, quieter, to the mirror, to hear it.
My left hand was still on the rail. The little finger bent in at the top joint, toward the others. The same as mine.
That couldn’t be right.
I turned the hand over and back. It was a different hand, smaller, with pink nails, and the finger did exactly what my finger had always done. I decided the wish had kept it, the way it had kept the eyebrows. It wasn’t hurting anybody.
* * *
On Sunday everybody called me something. Yvette called me sweetheart, and good girl when I finished my soup. The lady with the lunch cart called me my love. Tracy called me honey, and Paige, and once Paigey, and then stopped with her mouth a little open, as if she’d dropped something.
I didn’t correct one of them.
I liked she best. Nobody calls you she to your face. You have to be in the next room for it, or asleep, or somebody has to be telling somebody else about you, and they have to do it without thinking. Dr. Anand did it without thinking, in the hall, to Tracy. “She’s doing very well. She’s a strong kid. She’ll be tired for a few weeks.”
That afternoon Tracy got her camera out of her purse. It was a little silver one. She turned it on and sat on the bed beside me with her shoulder against mine so we could both see the screen.
“Dr. Anand said pictures were fine,” she said. “These are from your birthday. Is that okay? Tell me if it’s not okay.”
“It’s okay.”
She pressed the arrow. The first picture was a living room with boxes stacked against every wall but one. Somebody stood in front of the fireplace in a pink dress, with her arms straight down at her sides and her hair standing up a little with static.
It was my face. It was the face from the washroom mirror, a week younger, with its eyes on something just past the camera, on the wall behind whoever was taking the picture.
I knew that look. I’d been doing it for years.
Tracy kept pressing the arrow. The same person stood between two girls, and then sat behind a pink cake.
“You hated that dress,” Tracy said. “You said it was itchy. You wore your hoodie over it all afternoon, and I made you take it off for these.” She turned the camera off and held it in her lap. “I keep thinking it was the dress. Isn’t that stupid? You get a virus, and I keep thinking it was the dress.”
“It’s a nice dress,” I said.
She looked at me. Then she put the camera back in her purse and zipped it shut, and went to find out about supper.
On Monday a physiotherapist with a whistle on his lanyard walked me up and down the hall twice. He called me kiddo, and young lady when I tried to skip the second lap. Most of the doors were closed. One had a drawing taped to it of a horse with too many legs. One had a Flames pennant. In Calgary that could have been anybody.
In the afternoon Tracy brought a hairbrush from home. It was a wide flat one, with long black hairs still caught in it. She sat behind me on the bed and did my hair for most of an hour. She went slowly at the back where it was knotted, holding the hair above the knot so it wouldn’t pull.
Nobody had ever done my hair. Not like that. Not for an hour.
“You never let me do this,” Tracy said behind me. Her voice was careful. “Not since you were about eight. You used to say I pulled.”
“You don’t pull.”
The brush stopped. Then it went on.
“Do you remember Henderson pool?” she said after a while. “In Lethbridge? The big slide? You went down it until your lips were blue and the lifeguard made you sit out.”
“No.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “That’s okay.”
When she was finished she put the brush down and came around to the side of the bed and took my left hand. She bent the little finger gently at the top, the way you’d test a hinge, and laughed once through her nose.
“There’s my hook,” she said.
I let her hold on to it.
* * *
I didn’t sleep much on Tuesday night.
Tracy was in the folded-out chair with her mouth open a little, one arm over her eyes against the light from the hall. The night nurse came in at one and again at three and didn’t turn on the big light. Between those times I lay and looked at the phone on the bedside table. It was beige and heavy, with a sticker on the handset that said DIAL 9 FOR AN OUTSIDE LINE.
At two I picked it up. I pressed 9. I dialled the first six numbers of the house in Hawkwood.
I could see the phone they’d ring, on the kitchen wall by Donna’s calendar, where everyone in the family had a colour of pen and mine was green. I’d been practising Donna and Gordon since Sunday. In my head it still came out Mom about half the time.
If somebody answered, I’d have to know who.
If nobody did, I’d have to know that.
I put the phone down. Tracy said two words in her sleep that I didn’t catch and turned over in the chair. I lay with the card under my pillow and listened to the night nurse’s shoes go up and down the hall until the window started going grey at about four.
* * *
On Wednesday Tracy brought clothes from home in a Co-op bag. A T-shirt, grey sweatpants, socks, runners, and a grey hoodie with a zip.
“Your grey one,” she said. “Your favourite. I mean, it was. It is. You wore it every day.”
The hoodie smelled like fabric softener and a house I’d never been in. Both strings were chewed flat at the ends. I hadn’t done that. Somebody had, for years, in class probably, without noticing. Somebody had been Paige Dekker for fourteen years and gone down the slide at Henderson pool until their lips were blue and hadn’t let anyone do their hair since they were eight. If I was here, they had to be somewhere.
I put my hands in the front pocket so I wouldn’t have to look at the nails. Then I took the card out from under the pillow and put it in the pocket too.
Dr. Anand came at noon with a sheet of paper about head injuries and a follow-up appointment in four weeks.
“If she’s very hard to wake,” she said.
“911,” Tracy said. “I know. I’m putting it on the fridge. I have a fridge. It’s just behind some boxes right now. I’ll move the boxes.” She folded the paper in half and in half again. “Thank you. Thank you for. Thank you.”
Yvette wheeled me down. Hospital rules, she said: nobody walks out, you get driven. The elevator was full of a family with balloons. The lobby went up four storeys and was every colour, and it was loud, and it smelled like the coffee place by the doors. Tracy went to get the car from the parkade and Yvette parked me by the glass to wait.
A white Ford with a ladder rack came up the loop and stopped in the fifteen-minute spot across from the doors, facing away from us. There was a Stampeders sticker in the back window.
Half the trucks in Calgary were white Fords with ladder racks. Half of those had the sticker.
I heard the door shut on the far side. Somebody big walked around the back of the truck, and the ladder rack was between us, and then Tracy pulled up in a silver Sunfire with a licence plate frame from a dealership in Lethbridge and stopped right in front of me. I couldn’t see anything but her car.
Yvette helped me up out of the chair and hugged me, quickly, and told me I was to be very boring from now on.
I could have turned around in the seat. I put my seatbelt on.
Tracy pulled out onto Shaganappi and headed north. “Are you hungry? Do you want a Tim’s? Do you want to go straight home? You don’t remember home. That’s okay. It’s a rental. It’s got a lot of boxes. You don’t have to like it.”
“Okay,” I said.
In the side mirror the hospital went down behind us on its hill, red, yellow, green and blue, like blocks somebody had stacked and left out. The card was in the front pocket of the hoodie, folded once. I kept my hand on it all the way to Royal Oak.